Dov Ronaan
by celestinaskym
Summary: When dragon words split the sky and secrets skulk in shadows, an angry forest girl must put an end to an evil that threatens to destroy her home.
1. Chapter 1

The day was grim, the sky choked thick with clouds that rolled slowly overhead, their distant growling threatening constant downpour. A heavy mist lay in the forest, veiling the moss-covered logs and tight-packed evergreens and the mountain flowers that grew in tight clusters beside a shallow pond where a single elk dipped its head to drink. Thunder rippled through the trees, and the elk straightened its neck, its dark eyes wide as it scanned the silent trees for danger. A small sound glimmered out from behind a stone, and the elk was gone, dancing lightly through the trees until it vanished into the dark ferns, their leaves shuddering in its wake.

Wedged between two stones only a pace away from the where the elk had fled, a wicker box tied with a worn leather belt muffled the faint cries from within. Ravens flocked to the branches of the trees around it, their beady eyes staring down in morbid curiosity at the woven box. A brown fox ventured from its den, but turned and hid at the sight of the birds crowding around the box, fluttering down to peck at it with shiny black beaks.

The ferns fluttered and a great grey wolf emerged, her fur darkened with mud and her eyes ablaze, a hare dangling from her snout. A single snarl sent the ravens shooting into the sky in a flurry of ebon feathers, their raucous voices mingling with the thunder that split the sky.

The wolf dropped the hare beside the stone and began to pace, her growls turning to whines as she circled the box, frustrated by the cries she heard within. She tried, as she had done many times before, to pull the belt from the box with her teeth, but the hold was taut and she could not free the trapped thing inside. Angry, the wolf lay beside the wicker box, her watchful eyes on it as the rain began to fall, cutting through the mist that coated the forest floor and soaking the spongy ground.

There was quiet in the forest for a time, broken only by the rain that pattered down and the faint cries within the box. The wolf rested her head on her front paws, her large dark eyes watching, full of sadness. When another sound broke through the trees, a footstep, the wolf started, her ears pricking at the snap of a branch. She watched as the evergreen boughs parted and a boy appeared there, small in size, a fine wood bow in his hands. The boy froze at the sight of her, and for a moment they watched one another, each analyzing the threat before them.

He was small, she could tell beneath the leathers he wore, and his large brown eyes stared up at her through a spray of untidy, nut-colored hair. She could see his thin chest rising and falling rapidly beneath his cloak, his hand quivering and his knuckles white on his bow. The wolf studied him a moment more, then slowly stepped back, her bristled fur smoothing and her jowls relaxing. Without a sound, she turned and was gone into the trees, vanishing into the dark forest.

The boy let out a stuttering breath of relief, then a smile, as if his own willpower had scared away the beast. He climbed boldly into the clearing, then paused at the sound of the muffled cries within the box. Curiosity on his round, young face, the boy leaned his bow against a tree and peered behind the stone, carefully wedging the box from its hiding-place, surprised at its weight. He sat upon the mossy ground, pulling the belt away as thunder rippled through the sky, his eyes widening as he lifted the woven lid.

A small girl lay inside the wicker bin, swaddled tightly in a damp, mottled cloth, staring up at him, red-faced and round-eyed.

"Nalimir?" The boy turned at the sound of his name, the basket tumbling from his lap at the sudden motion. The baby tumbled out, her small fist grasping for someone to catch her as a grown man shouldered through the ferns. He moved forward swiftly, past the boy, and scooped the child into his arms, whispering to calm her strangled cries.

"Who is she?" the boy asked, peering over his father's arm at the baby, her freckled arms flailing. The man didn't answer, but ran a work-worn hand through his sandy hair, his dark eyes troubled.

"Come on, then," he murmured, tucking the girl beneath his cloak, and he shouldered the boy's bow and led him from the clearing by the hand.

They traveled through the dripping forest, moving swiftly over the tree-lined hills. The air was chill and sharp as the year's end approached, and the rain soaked into cold, muddy ground, chilling the boy to the bone. He followed his father deftly through the trees, his small boots carefully finding the solid footholds among wet, spongy ground. They climbed a hill in the rain, falling thickly now, and a small cabin peered out from between the branches of the evergreens, its wood weathered and greyed from many years exposed. The boy's father bade him go first, and Nalimir climbed limberly up a wooden ladder to the cabin's covered porch that overlooked the misty forest.

His father carefully followed him up, one hand curled protectively around the girl that was quiet now, her round blue eyes fixed on the sandy-haired man as if she'd never seen anything quite like him. Nalimir watched as his father unlocked the cabin's door and they went in, into the relief of the dry, dark cabin.

Nalimir had grown up in the cabin's four sturdy walls, and calm settled on his boyish shoulders as he closed the door behind them, the familiarity of the place seeping in through the cold of the outdoors. He hung his bow on a peg beside the door as he had been taught, then watched as his father carefully laid the girl down on a bedroll before the hearth, then went to fetch a flint from the cupboard. Nalimir sat down cross-legged on the bedroll, locking eyes with the girl as surely as he had with the wolf in the woods.

He could see her more clearly now, in the light from the fire that flicked up from his father's flint. The baby's skin was milky pale, dusted all across her face with freckles that spilled down her neck and across her arms. Her hair spun from her head in wild red curls, grown damp from the rain and fine as the fur on a peach, and she stared defiantly back at him.

"Where did it come from?" he asked his father, who was rummaging in a chest for a blanket that wasn't mottled and wet with mold.

"The woods," he said simply, wrapping the girl in the clean blanket. "And that may be all we'll ever know."

They called her Merill, after a ranger from a Bosmer children's tale Nalimir's father used to tell him on stormy nights. She was a fierce crier when she wanted for anything, and had a habit of grasping the cloth of Nalimir's tunic when he went by the crate they'd lined with blankets to serve as her crib. Despite her wailing and noise, Nalimir liked the little baby. There was something strong about her, passion in her tiny voice and a certain willfulness in her fiery blue gaze.

Years of rain and mist passed, and little changed in the cabin except the children inside it. The boy grew tall and lanky, his hair a constant shaggy mess about his shoulders, while the girl stood two heads shorter, her arms plump with the promise of muscle and her hair a wild mat of curls around a firm, square jaw. Nalimir's father, who was called Brelin, was fond of the spirited girl, and he watched her grow alongside his own son, saw her learn to climb the great evergreens around the cabin and speak the words from the few weathered books on the cabin's shelf. When she was old enough, he took her into the forest as he had once done with Nalimir and helped her choose a branch from the trees, showed her how to carve off the bark and bend it into a bow. The girl watched in fascination as Brelin showed her how to slice the wood just so and strung it with a strong bowstring, mounted it between two risers and left it to set on the porch. She would sit outside before the bow, which was barely a foot tall, her small freckled hands balled into fists.

She bounded down the hills into the forests ahead of Brelin on the day he declared it was ready, and she nearly snatched the thing from his hands with excitement. Nalimir watched them sullenly from the cabin's porch, his skinny legs dangling over the edge as Merill's bright hair danced away into the trees. The three always went into the woods together, but this time Brelin had made him stay, telling him a girl's first shot is a private thing.

Merill went first through the forest, clambering confidently over moss-swallowed logs and pushing through evergreen boughs heavy with dew. The colder months were drawing near, and soon the rain would turn to halfhearted snow that would dust the treetops beneath the perpetually cloud-choked sky. The hood around the girl's vibrant curls had slid down around her neck, and the drizzle slowly soaked through her hair and ran down her freckled face, though she showed little mind as she swung and leapt and crashed through the trees, Brelin following dutifully behind.

When they reached a quiet spot he called the girl back and knelt beside her, carefully sliding an arrow that stood no taller than his knee from a quiver on his back.

"Now this is dangerous," he told her firmly, and she gave a solemn nod, watching him with those wide bright eyes. "You must always remember that you could seriously hurt someone with this."

"Isn't that what it's supposed to do?" she asked, puzzled.

"Only when it has to," Brelin replied sagely, and he handed her the bow. She took hold of the grip around its middle, surprised at how light it was, and held it out like she had seen Brelin and Nalimir do, seizing the bowstring with her fist and moving to yank it back.

"Careful," Brelin said hastily, reaching around her and gently prying her hand off the bowstring. "Just two fingers, like this. Don't grip too tight with your left hand….that's this one. Point your feet that way, don't put your elbow up so high…good." She stood frozen that way, her small arm quivering with the effort of holding the bowstring back, her face screwed up in concentration. Brelin bade her relax, then lifted the arrow, pointed to the fletching and the point and the nock, showing her how it hooked onto the bowstring and how not to squeeze it with her fingers. Distant thunder rolled overhead, but Merill paid it no mind, focused instead on drawing the arrow back, angling its point toward the tree Brelin pointed to. She heaved a great breath, then let the arrow fly, watching it cut through the mist and miss the tree, _thwack_ing into the brush a ways to the right.

The girl's narrow shoulders slumped as she lowered the bow, frustration coloring her face.

"Why didn't it hit?" she complained, looking down at the bow as if it were a great personal offense to her.

"Well, Merry," Brelin replied patiently, "you've never shot before. And nobody gets it the first time they try, do they?" She glared at him a moment, fire burning in her stare.

Merill gazed at him a split second more before she reached out, snatching another arrow from his quiver and jamming it onto the bowstring, awkwardly mustering herself into position. The second arrow missed the tree as well, as did the third, and the fourth, and every arrow after it. She made Brelin take her into the forest every day afterward, made him watch and correct her as she fired at the tree, growing frustrated, but never tiring. When she failed to his the tree after a week, she began rising long before the sun, sneaking a handful of arrows from Brelin's quiver and standing on a stack of furs to reach her bow on its peg by the door and slipping out of the cabin on her own, cutting through the dark morning mists and shooting until her freckled knuckles bled.

Merill hit the tree in the third week of trying, and she was so stunned that for a time she could only stare. From that instant, her world seemed to bloom with possibility, the dark, rainy forest springing to sudden life that she had never noticed. Brelin taught her to watch for the flicker of a leaf and listen for the snap of a twig, how to draw the arrow back in silence, how to pull the nock back to her chin and breathe in, letting time slow around her as her fingers unfolded, the arrow spinning and soaring away from her. Her shot was crooked at first, but in time grew stronger, straighter.

Where Brelin's days had once been spent in quiet, unbroken by his solemn son, Merill's presence breathed fresh life into the cabin. Her vibrant laugh, deep and heaving, filled its corners, and as a child she hung flowers she'd collected from the forest around the walls. She had little patience for books and maps like Nalimir, though she would sit in rapt attention when Brelin told them stories from Valenwood, folklore of the ancient Bosmer. Her favorites were the stories of the tree-cities that walked on their roots and never stayed in one place for long, their residents packing up and walking alongside them or riding in their branches until the trees decided to settle for a time.

They hunted near every day, sometimes together, but often splintering off into the forest, Nalimir sometimes wandering along behind Merill, watching her. Though he was several years her senior, he was amazed at her quick skill with the bow, how deftly she handled it and the easy way she could land an arrow into the eye of a stag on the other end of a valley. On days when the rain was too heavy or snow dusted the boughs of the evergreens and chilled all the game into their dens, Brelin would light a fire in the cabin and the children would crowd onto the worn rug before it, tossing pinecones into the flames to watch them splinter and pop.

When they had a good hunt, Brelin would send Nalimir and Merill into the village a few hours' walk away, though the two would make it longer as Merill dared Nalimir to climb the tallest tree they could find and he prodded her to try and shoot a raven's nest off of a distant branch. The village where they sold their game was quiet and grim, as hazy and damp as the forest but filled with weary-eyed people and surrounded by cracked and weathered gravestones. The villagers didn't like Merill and Nalimir, and they made it no secret – farmers would pause their work and lean on their hoes when the pair passed, eyes dark and untrusting. Guards in the watchtowers would lean imposingly against the pillars, their faces hidden beneath their helms, and children their age would trail behind them, casting stones at their heels.

This always made Merill's temper flare, and on one occasion she threw down her game bag and beat the closest boy into the road, slamming her fist so hard against his face that his nose broke, spraying blood onto the cobblestones.

"Traitor!" the other children screamed at her as Nalimir dragged her off the sobbing boy, her face red and her bright blue eye alive with anger. "The forest rat fucks elves!"

Still, the villagers were poor hunters, and they bought Brelin's game with much chagrin, though they wouldn't look Merill or Nalimir in the eye when the coin passed hands. The whole town seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief with the odd freckled girl and her tall, quiet companion retreated back into the woods.

Despite her tempestuous heart and her heated blood, Merill never felt a desire to stray from the cabin in the forest. She felt safe in the rainy branches of the woods, cloaked in the mist that blanketed the trees. The little one-roomed cabin was home to her, and she never once wondered at the world beyond it.

One chill summer day, many years after Nalimir had found the wolf guarding the tiny basket in the woods, the sun pushed its way out from behind the clouds, peering down through the trees and dappling light upon the mossy ground. Merill watched it splinter through the branches of the evergreen she was perched in, staining the ground far below with a light that was almost resplendent to her rain-accustomed eyes. She kept her gaze trained on the ground, her fingers curled around the nock of an arrow, and watched a hare slowly nose its way into the sunlight, its ears twitching. Merill, straddling the branch from high above, slowly raised her bow, drawing the nock back to her chin and angling the arrow for the hare's head. She took in a breath, narrowing her gaze and pointing the arrow just a bit to the left. She felt something stir in her, a familiar sense of excitement that always seemed to bubble up when she felt the fletching of her arrow brush her cheek, a deep-rooted need to hunt that coursed through her as her left elbow locked, the arms of the bow creaking as they were pulled back.

The breath she'd been holding in left her lungs in a sigh as her fingers sprang loose, the arrow cutting silently through the branches of the evergreen and into the rabbit's head with a dull sound, pinning it to the spongy ground. Merill slung her bow over her shoulder and swung down from the branch, sliding skillfully down the dew-laden boughs until she landed in the mud with a _squelch,_ pine needles showering down around her.

"That's another point for me," she called out as she yanked the arrow out, snatching up the hare by its hind feet and waving it cajolingly at the brush. Nalimir shouldered his way out of the bushes, his own bow in hand and annoyance on his narrow face.

"Doesn't count, look how little it is," he insisted as Merill tied the rabbit up and hung it to her belt alongside two others and a crow.

"Then the salmon you shot that's barely longer than my hand doesn't count either," she shot back jokingly as he joined her on the other side of the clearing, blinking in the light that shafted down through the trees.

"It was the biggest one in the water –"

"Bullshit, I saw ones five times that size leaping this morning."

"Did you have your eyes closed?" Nalimir asked lightly, and Merill punched his shoulder.

"Nearly six years younger and I'm still a better shot than you," she teased, sliding the arrow back into her quiver and heading for the narrow deer trail that wound through the trees toward their cabin. "AndI'm a _Nord,_ even."

"Not a good one, since you're not in a tavern getting too drunk to swing a blade every night."

"We're going to go to a tavern someday and get you drunk," Merill told him brightly, slinging her arm around his shoulders despite his height. "Probably only takes a sip, skinny as you are."

"How would _you_ know?" Nalimir asked her scathingly, and she flashed him a grin.

"I might not have _been _to one, but I'm still a Nord. Mead's in our blood." Nalimir smiled at her, one corner of his mouth pulling up higher than the other.

"You know they wouldn't even let us in the tavern in Falkreath," he told her, and Merill dropped her arm.

"You've really got to quit with ruining the mood, you know?" she told him, jogging ahead of him to vault over a mossy log in the trail. "Here, let's see if the honey's in," she called back, pushing through the bushes along the trail and ducking under a low-hanging branch. Nalimir followed her to a beehive rooted into an old aspen tree, humming with sound.

"You have to smoke them out first, you know," he called to her, hanging back while she drew her skinning knife from her belt.

"Let them sting me," she said boldly, stepping up to the nest and wedging the knife in. "Brelin says that scars are a sign that you've done something brave."

"Or stupid," Nalimir replied, and Merill ignored him. The bees hummed angrily as she pared out a block of honeycomb, swarming out from the hive and circling her bright hair. She laughed as she jerked away from the tree, a sticky chunk of honeycomb clutched in her hand, waving bees away with it. "Here," she said, breaking it in half and handing one to Nalimir. He held it up, scanning its pockets for larvae. "Gods, quit worrying," she scolded him, biting into hers as she wandered back to the path.

"Do you think the Dunmer really eat bugs?" he asked inquisitively, still checking his honeycomb as he followed her down the trail.

"Dunno," she answered, wiping the honey from her mouth with her leather bracer. She'd long grown used to Nalimir's curious questions that seemed to crop up from nowhere. "Why?"

"That book we got in town yesterday, about Morrowind. It said that before the Red Year they grew giant bugs in mines and ate their eggs."

"That might explain why they're all so bitter," she replied lightly.

"Might have something to do with the collective stick up all their asses –"

"Wait," Merill said suddenly, freezing in the path and throwing out an arm to stop him. She stood stock still, staring into the brush to their left. Nalimir turned sharply, his hand going to his bow – and, sure enough, the snap of a twig followed, and they both had arrows nocked in an instant – they'd been hunting long enough to know that elk didn't move so loudly, and no other game was large enough to make a sound. The bushes trembled and noise made the birds overhead shoot into the sky, their cries filling the chill air, and Nalimir slackened his bow, grabbing Merill's arm and pulling her back into the brush as a dozen men in quilted blue armour emerged, dirt smeared on their faces and blood in their beards. Merill felt Nalimir draw a tight breath beside her.

"Agents kept going south, he said," one of the soldiers was saying gruffly. "Couldn't have caught them even if he was right."

"Tell Ulfric when we get back to Windhelm," another remarked doggedly as they pushed through the bushes on the other side of the trail. "He'll sort it out." The sound of their footfalls began to fade, though Merill and Nalimir stayed frozen in the branches.

"I could have taken them," Merill snarled, jerking her arm out of Nalimir's grip and shoving out of the bushes, picking leaves out of her hair.

"And what would you have done?" he asked her loftily. "Killed them?"

"I could do it," Merill insisted, sliding the unused arrow back into her quiver. "I've killed bears."

"Bears and Stormcloaks are different," Nalimir murmured as they started back down the path. The sun was lessening now, retreating behind the clouds again. Thunder roiled in the distance.

"I don't like them being in the woods," she complained as they started up the hill where the cabin was perched. "It's not right. They shouldn't bring their stupid war all the way out here."

"They must have forgotten to ask your opinion," he commented wryly, and she was about to reply when a strained shout cut through the trees like ice, sending birds shooting up from the branches in a panic.

"That was Brelin," Merill said at once, and in an instant they were both running, sprinting down the muddy deer trail toward the cabin, boots slipping as the sky overhead darkened, bows in hand. A cruel, acrid smell reached her nose and she saw smoke rising through the trees, panic beating in her throat.

"Dad!" Nalimir was shouting, a few paces ahead – she was smaller and a better shot, but Nalimir had always been faster. He loped around the corner, pushing through the branches there, and they whipped back, striking Merill square in the face and sending her sprawling back into the mud, winded. "_Dad!_" she heard Nalimir calling, and she struggled to regain her breath, grasping for her fallen bow. She could hear fire now – hissing and spitting. Fear seized her and she scrambled to her feet, ducking under a branch and around the corner.

The sight that met her eyes made her stomach turn.

Their cabin – their beautiful, weathered cabin – was engulfed in flame, searing orange tongues leaping up from the windows and into the sky, choking it with heavy black smoke. Tall men in dark, gold-trimmed robes stood before it, their faces silhouetted by the intensity from the fire, and Merill's heart clenched in dread when she saw Nalimir there, being struck to the ground by one of them.

_Go,_ she willed herself, but her legs felt frozen in fear. _Go, help him._ But she could only watch, horrified, from the brush as one of the men drew his blade, a spell sparking into his hand. She saw Nalimir turn, and their eyes met. His were wide, full of fear, pleading. Then Merill was gone, sprinting through the trees, fear pumping through her heart as she ran blindly, the pine needles and scratching her face and arms. Something caught her around the leg and she stumbled, turned, and faced one of the men, a golden-eyed man with a long white braid that raised a dagger to her face. She felt searing pain, a line of fire drawn down the left side of her face, then she had kneed him between the legs and taken off again, dashing through the pines as the cabin burned behind her and blood streamed down her face, her vision swimming.

She lost track of how long she ran, ran from the man with golden eyes and the fire and smoke that clouded the air, but at some point she collapsed, stumbling to the mossy ground in a daze. When she stirred, the night was dark, the forest quiet, and she rolled slowly onto her back, wincing at the searing pain that pounded through the left side of her face. She had fallen beside a small pond, and a fox stood on the other end, watching her stiffly. When she looked at it, it turned swiftly, vanishing into the brush.

Merill gingerly raised a hand to her cheek and immediately flinched away – her fingers came away smeared with blood. Her vision on that side was entirely covered in blood, her eye throbbing, and she hastily dipped her hands in the pond, trying to scrub the blood away. The water made the wound burn more, but she bit her lip and forced herself to clean it and pack it with moss the way Brelin had shown her. The thought of Brelin made her heart twist with guilt and she felt tears building in her right eye.

"Gods," she whispered, clutching the moss against her face and rocking back, her other hand clenching up fistfuls of grass. "Gods, gods, what have I done?" She had crouched there, motionless, as Nalimir ran forward, watched him be thrown to the ground and saw the Altmer raise his sword. He had turned to her, staring at her, his eyes screaming out for help. And then she had fled, like a coward. Merill curled her head down onto the moss, the cries raking her body, and remained there, her tears soaking into the earth, until the sky began to brighten.

The following day, everything on her left side was blurred, hazy lines melting together and colors dulling. By the evening, it had darkened even more, and the next morning the sight in her left eye was gone. She stared at her reflection in the broken glass on an abandoned trading post, the long, cruel-looking gash that stretched from her forehead to the tip of her nose and crossed through her eye, now spotted with clouds. In the year that followed, the clouds in her eye would grow to cover it all, and there would be brief, blissful times when she would forget that half her sight was gone until she crossed a mirror or a window and the realization would strike her like a stone.

Merill wandered westward alone, unsure of where she was going, but dragged on by a need to keep moving. She was still very young and had never been out of the drizzly southern forests, and when someone made to stop her she would run, relying on her slight size to climb a rocky hill or tree and get away. Days passed and the weather cooled, and at some point Merill found her way to a cobbled road that led up into a city built straight into the mountain, its face of rough grey stone capped with ancient brass rooftops, surrounded by craggy mountains where gnarled trees leaned their bare branches down. The guards paid her no mind as she ducked past them through the gates, and the fervent energy of the city shook her.

Stone buildings loomed overhead, paths and bridges climbing up too many stories to count, and narrow waterfalls splashed down into rocky brooks that wound their way through the ancient cobbled streets. There were people everywhere she looked, people like she had never seen – tall, dark-skinned women in scarves with great curved blades on their belts, clusters of robed monks shuffling through the square with their heads down, an Orc that must have been at least seven feet tall with an even taller warhammer strapped to his bare, scar-crossed back. In this strange city, no-one paid the nervous one-eyed girl any mind.


	2. Chapter 2

Years passed.

The girl found solace in a straggly gang of youths a bit older than she that nearly killed her when they caught her robbing the house they were squatting. She impressed them when she took three of them down in a heartbeat, finishing with a knife to their leader's neck. They were ex-miners from Markarth's brutal silver mines, not content with the abuse and misery that went into the meager jobs and instead retreating to the bridges above the city, relying on petty thievery and brawls with other street rats to survive.

Markarth was a staggeringly vast city, and in it, Merill gladly lost herself. There was a place for her among the craggy rooftops and grungy streets, a place where she didn't have to think about Brelin burning in the cabin or a sword through Nalimir's heart whenever she closed her eyes. The others in the gang never asked her questions – they all had pain in their past, and no-one wanted to talk about it.

There was a certain cruel comradery about them, a fierce sort of pride in their petty work to survive among the stone and silver of Markarth. Edrene was the leader, a Breton girl that was only two years Merill's senior but lethal with two axes. There were others, too – a quiet Argonian boy that Merill saw strangle a guard that tried to arrest her, an older Dunmer girl with a foul mouth that burned things and poured poison down the waterfalls when she was bored, two mean-faced Nord twins that were always beating one another up. They were all hard and mean, and Merill liked it. When she spent her time being cruel, she didn't have to think about the guilt that twisted her heart near in half.

A few years after Merill arrived in Markarth, a Khajiit girl joined them, Merill's age. Her name was Kiseen, and Merill's interest pricked when she saw the bow over the girl's shoulder. She hadn't shot once since the cabin burned, too afraid to see how badly her skill would have depleted after she lost half her sight.

Kiseen was patient, and quicker on her feet than Merill, and they began to spend long hours in the alleys down by the prison mine, Merill struggling to correct her shot. Her talent had waned after years of neglect, and the lack of an eye was a jarring correction to make. She snatched a bow out of the fletcher's shop the first chance she got, and she began to spend hours down in the alleys, sometimes with Kiseen to help and sometimes on her own, trying to keep her frustration quelled as she fired at the hay-bales stacked at the alley's end. Vague memories of similar determination stirred in her sometimes, memories of Brelin teaching her to hunt deep in the southern pine forest. When they surfaced, she pushed them down again, the guilt too strong to bear.

Over five years after her flight from the forest, the end of Last Seed found Merill perched atop one of the high stone walls of Markarth, her bow in her lap and her one eye gazing out over the craggy hills of the Reach as the sun sank down behind her. She had lost the softness in her face and belly, and now her jaw was hard and square, every bit of her tight with muscle. Her freckled skin was crisscrossed with scars, though they were all dwarfed by the great thick one that cut jaggedly down the left end of her face, through her one milky blind eye.

She hated being alone now. Being alone meant being idle, and being idle meant old memories clawing up. But it was the Harvest's End festival, and the others had all slunk down to the lower streets to see what mischief they could arouse. Merill hated the festivals – they reminded her of Nalimir, how much he would have loved them. Edrene hadn't said a word when Merill had climbed out the window of the current house they were squatting in while the others prepared to go. Merill knew they understood.

"Hungry?" Merill turned as Kiseen climbed up beside her, brandishing a sweet roll undoubtedly nicked from the festival below. The sounds from it were faint, this high up, but still there – lots of laughter and talk, and distant threads of music weaving by.

"Starved," she replied, snatching the sweet roll and tearing off a chunk of it. The roll was stale, probably from the baker's back cart, but she didn't care. To someone living off a diet of stolen scraps wherever they were found, the roll was a feast. "Didn't want to stay at the party?" she asked bitterly, picking off another bit of roll with her freckled, callused fingers. Kiseen gave Merill a searching look. She was a scrawny Khajiit, small with a dingy brown coat and keen yellow eyes under dirt-scrubbed fur, but Merill liked her all the same. None of the gangs in Markarth had anything to boast about. They'd heard once that the Dunmer in their own group was fucking a girl a few streets over, and Merill was no stranger to hasty one-night encounters, but out on the bridges, no-one really cared.

"You see one, you see them all," Kiseen told her airily, scooting over on the wall to dangle her feet beside Merill's. They were treacherously high, high enough to die instantly if they fell. But they wouldn't. Neither of them ever fell.

"Heard one of the Housecarls talking in the square yesterday," Kiseen remarked after a time. "Said it wouldn't be much longer till the Stormcloaks are at this gate."

"Why the hell would a Housecarl be in the square?" Merill asked skeptically, casting Kiseen a sidelong glance.

"I'm telling you, that's what they said," she insisted. "Sooner or later this place is going to be flying blue banners."

"The Stormcloaks were getting ready to rebel years ago. They're not gonna do it now," Merill muttered, glaring east, where the mountains rose jaggedly up, blocking the horizon. The setting sun had painted the clouds a dazzling pinkish gold, but it was now fading into an inky darkness, stars winking out from beneath the folds of sky.

"You gonna join up if they do?"

"No fucking way," Merill shot back, sudden venom in her voice. "They're the whole reason the Thalmor are here in the first place." Kiseen didn't respond. She knew better than to pry.

"They're saying it's safer in the south," Kiseen said finally, when the darkness had fallen fully and the city began to light up beneath them. They kept their backs to the festival, staring out at the quiet crags of the Reach instead. "Easier to get by. For Khajiit, at least."

"So you're saying you're leaving?" Merill asked, picking at the remains of the sweet roll.

"This city's just about dried up, Merill, you know well as I do," Kiseen told her tartly. "Sooner or later the Jarl's going to have to make a choice, and when he does things are going to change around here. The guards aren't going to look the other way anymore."

"So we find a different city," Merill said simply.

"A different city _in the south,_" Kiseen told her, and Merill glanced at her, one scarred eyebrow raised. "Edrene and the others, they're too stubborn, they'll stay in Markarth till they die, probably with a guard's sword through their bellies. We're smarter than that."

"You been thinking about this, eh?" Merill asked, offering her the remains of the sweet roll. Kiseen held up a paw and Merill tossed it behind them over the wall.

"I've heard people talking about Anvil – right on the western coast, huge now, bigger than Markarth, and full of rich Imperials. And we wouldn't have to worry about freezing in our sleep there," she added as a chill tugged at their sleeves. Merill turned her gaze southward, where the mountains hid Cyrodiil from sight. She just made to turn back to Kiseen when something struck her, hard, in the side of the head. She lost her balance and felt herself sliding off the wall, hands grasping for a hold. She caught the edge of the wall with one hand, clutching her bow with the other, her feet scrabbling at the wall for a foothold.

"_Renrij!_" she heard Kiseen snarling as she tossed her bow over, pulling herself back up. Her scalp was smarting where the stone had hit, but she had long since learned not to show it. Paulus and Cleo, two mangy teenagers from another gang, where at the other end of the wall, chucking stones.

"Go to hell," Merill snarled, yanking an arrow from her quiver.

"One-eye can't even shoot straight!" Paulus taunted. Her arrow struck him between the eyes and he tipped over the wall, his body cracking at the bottom. Cleo screamed and made to run, but a second arrow caught her in the back and she folded and tumbled down the wall's other side.

"Are you fucking stupid?" Kiseen hissed. "In the middle of a festival?"

"They were –"

"_Ja Kha-jay,_ Merill, they're going to throw us in Cidhna Mine," she snarled, and in an instant they were off, moving lightly across the wall and leaping to the next one as shouts echoed from below. They crossed the city with ease, taking the rooftops and the uppermost bridges and staying off the crowded lower streets, even as guards began to push through the crowd, yelling about a murder.

"Don't see why they care all of a sudden," Kiseen spat as they swung through the broken window into their current squatter, dark and littered with rubbish from a skooma bounce the night before. "They didn't give a shit when Ravir got dumped in the river."

"Let's go now!" Merill said suddenly, and Kiseen stared at her, her muddy eyes wide.

"_What?_"

"You said you wanted to go to Cyrodiil," Merill replied, excitement beginning to course through her as she snatched up her bag from its hiding place under a loose plank on the floor. "Let's go now!"

"Half the city's looking for us!"

"Which'll make it more fun," Merill told her with a wink, thrusting Kiseen's bag to her. "Let's go!"

"I swear to every god there is,_ Ja,_" Kiseen hissed as Merill yanked open the door and peered down the narrow street. "If we get thrown in that mine –"

"Shut up," Merill shot back. "You want to try something stupid?"

"We already are!" Kiseen was saying, but Merill didn't wait for an answer, instead sprinting forward and taking a running leap over the bridge and into the waterfall, screaming with delight as she sailed downward, curling into a ball and rolling at the shallow, rocky bottom. Festival-goers shrieked and skirted out of the way, and Merill shoved them aside, trusting that Kiseen was following as she shouldered her way through the crowd, running and ducking and swinging around the people that crowded the lower streets.

"Hold!" someone was shouting behind her, but it only spurred her on, adrenaline pumping through her veins. Something primal stirred deep inside her, a sort of gleeful thrill at the danger around her. "_Hold!_" An arrow flew past her, just missing her head, and struck the shoulder of a man in front of her. Merill leapt lightly over him as he stumbled and swung her bow as she neared the main city gates, blocked by a single guard. Her bow cracked him over the head with a sickening _crunch,_ and she raced past him, into the grassy field outside the city. She chanced a glance back – Kiseen was right behind her, and about seven guards spilling out the gate.

"Come on!" Merill shouted, wheeling around and making a beeline for the stables, and she lightly hopped the fence and swung herself up onto a grazing blue roan. Merill dug her heels into the horse's side and it sprang at her touch, jumping the fence with ease and galloping down the road, toward the dark mountains overhead, leaving the noise-choked city behind.


	3. Chapter 3

There seemed to be no end to the southern rains, wind whispering through the trees and thunder grumbling distantly overhead. Merill and Kiseen rode in silence, hoods pulled up over their faces, their horses' hooves squelching on the muddy trail. Merill's euphoria at their triumphant escape had faded fast ten minutes out of Markarth, when Kiseen had slumped over on her horse from an arrow in her shoulder. There had been a terrible moment of hesitation before Merill wound back around to help her, fearing that same guilt over Brelin and Nalimir that had haunted her for five years.

"How is it?" Merill ventured, breaking the damp silence.

"Aches," Kiseen answered gruffly, pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders and wincing. Merill had managed to pull the arrowhead out two days previous, but she worried about the infection. She used to know all the forest plants for healing, but it had been years since she'd been in the forest, and those memories were gone.

"You been here before?" Kiseen ventured, and Merill glanced over at her, startled. "It's just…you seem like you know the roads. Which way to go and all."

"Just...going south," Merill answered hastily, her eyes back to the muddy trail before them. "We're going to Cyrodiil, right? And Cyrodiil's in the south."

"Forget I asked," Kiseen murmured. In truth, being in the southern forests again unsettled Merill. Where she had once found such solace in the tower pines and hazy green shadows and the perpetually rainy sky, now every whisper of wind that made the pine needles twirl reminded her of Nalimir racing through the trees, mud splattered on his face, fear in his eyes as fire sent shadows across his face.

They went on for some hours, mostly in silence, following the twisting, muddy trail that turned more overgrown and dark the deeper they followed it. When the sky was beginning to darken and the rain starting to fade, they first heard the other voices, coming from somewhere in the dark trees.

Kiseen yanked back on her horse's reins, her ears pricking under her hood, and Merill instinctively whipped her bow off her back, nocking an arrow from the quiver at her hip. She stared at the ground, letting her left ear carry the weight of her dead eye, and slowly raised the bow, directed at the trees ahead.

"We got them all, I told you," one was saying, a stuffy-sounding Imperial man.

"Protocol is to search a five kilometer radius of the camp," another voice responded, certainly a Nord this time. Merill made to draw her arrow back, but Kiseen hastily rested a hand on her arm, lowering it. Before they had a chance to react, four men clad in Imperial red burst onto the trail, and Merill yanked the bowstring back, holding it angled at their heads. Kiseen had drawn her spear from her back, grasping it tight despite the pain in her shoulder.

"Hold," the leader said, as the three others drew their blades. "Lower your weapons."

"Maybe when you go on your way," Merill shot back, and Kiseen cast her a look.

"We don't want any trouble," she told them, holding her spear back with one paw and raising the other in a peace gesture.

"Then why's this one got her arrow pointed at us, eh?" one asked sharply.

"We're just travelling," Kiseen tried again.

"Travelling this close to the border?" the leader drawled. "With two purebred mounts? Hard to imagine you're just out taking a walk. I'll tell you one more time, lower your weapons."

"You got emigration papers?" another asked. "Or are you working with the Stormcloaks? Trying to sneak someone out of Skyrim?"

"This one's a Khajiit, idiot," another snapped. "They're not working with the Stormcloaks."

"Not this one," the leader said, stepping forward. Merill angled her arrow toward him, her grip on the nock tightening. He stood boldly before it, a smirk on his face. "What's a good Nord girl like you doing with a cat, eh lass?" he asked her, and Merill narrowed her eyes, keeping her aim firm. She could kill this man easily, but would they be able to get away from the others in time?

"Go on, girl, put it down," another called. Merill didn't dare take her eyes off him, forcing herself not to glance at Kiseen.

"Search them," he commanded, and the officers moved forward to pull them off their horses. She heard Kiseen leap from her horse and heard her yowl as they kicked her to the ground. In an instant, she turned her arrow on the officer who'd strode away and let it fly, burying itself deep into the back of his skull. The trail erupted into chaos, and Merill felt herself thrown to the ground, her bow pried from her grip. She struggled, but then there was a searing pain in her head and the world spun and went dark.

A loose stone in the path jolted her awake.

Merill started as her head snapped to one side and her vision cleared to reveal the swishing tail of a horse, its rhythmic hoofbeats feeling wrongly calm and clashing with the air of doom that had settled over the cart.

"You're awake." Merill turned to face the grizzled man that sat across from her, his face smeared with blood and his eyes grim. She didn't answer, but glanced around the rest of the cart – three other tired-looking men, two in blue Stormcloak armor and one in rags. Another cart was ahead of them and Merill craned her neck to try and see who sat inside, but the mist from the previous night's rain was too thick. The sky overhead was a pale, bland grey, a grim morning. Merill sat back in her seat, fiddling with the ties on her wrists. There was silence for a time, broken only by those steady, rhythmic beats from the horse's hooves.

"You were trying to cross the border, weren't you?" the man across from her asked, and Merill's attention snapped back to him.

"How do you know that?" she asked hastily, and he looked surprised.

"Heard a soldier saying it when they were putting you up," he told her offhandedly.

"And the other that was with me? The Khajiit What about her?" The man shook his head, glancing at the cart's rough-hewn floor. Merill's stomach dropped. _No,_ she thought desperately, trying to see the cart ahead of them again. _Please, Talos, no. Not Kiseen too._

"Heard them say she put up a good fight, at least," another murmured, and frustration pulled at Merill, angry, hot frustration. _Again._

"Where are we going?" she asked the man, refusing to let herself look weak. She hadn't cried in years, not since she lost her eye fleeing from the forest.

"End of the line," one of the other Stormcloaks responded dolefully.

"What do you mean, 'end'?" the man in rags asked, panic in his voice.

"What do you think, horse-thief?" the grizzled soldier murmured, shaking his head. He stared off over the driver's shoulder. "This…This is Helgen. I used to be sweet on a girl from here…" he drifted off, and Merill followed his gaze to the stone-and-wood walls of a small village. Guards prowling the walls opened the great wooden gates and the cart ahead of theirs trundled through.

"What's wrong with him?" the horse-thief was asking, staring past Merill.

"Watch your tone!" the grizzled man snapped, his voice turning to anger. "You are speaking of Ulfric Stormcloak, the true High King of Skyrim!"

Merill turned, alarmed, to face the silent bear of a man hulking in the seat beside her – he glared downward, gagged and bound with chain rather than rope like the rest of them, his dirty yellow braids hanging limply on a once-grand fur cloak. _Does this mean the war's done?_

A shadow rippled over the cart as they passed beneath the walls and into the town, watched by clusters of children along the houses and their grim-faced kin, Imperial soldiers in red and gold on dark horses, Thalmor that watched with faces narrowed in disdain. General Tullius was there, his eyes scanning the faces of the condemned. Merill met their gaze, her mind racing. _Focus on getting out,_ she told herself hastily. _You can do that. You've gotten out of worse than this._

The carts rounded the corner and came to a halt in the square, where a block stained black stood before a box. A hooded priest stood beside the executioner, whispering prayers. Merill felt her stomach drop. _No…_ surely execution wasn't the punishment for trying to leave Skyrim… Panic welled inside her, her heart racing and her face growing hot. Merill and Nalimir had once seen an execution in Falkreath, the beheading of a man who'd ravaged a little girl in the woods and then dumped her body in the well. They had been much younger then, and all Merill could remember were the jeers and screams of the villagers and the sickening thud as the man's head left his neck. In the Reach, they just threw the condemned from the mountaintops, letting the rocky ground deliver justice.

Someone yelled a command, and the Stormcloaks around her stood as one, slowly moving to the ends of their carts, their faces dark. Merill joined them, staring around for an opening. There were stone walls – looked easy to climb too, not as old as Markarth's, but with enough footholds to get by. How far would she make it though, with her hands bound up? She'd once scaled the side of Understone Keep with a great bleeding cut from an axe on one arm, but that was the worst she'd ever endured. Tied, and with a dozen arrows at her back…

She stared, hard, at the cobblestones as the Imperials read names from a list, as the rebels stepped forward one by one. The horse-thief tried to run, and an Imperial on horseback killed him with an arrow in the back. Fear began to claw its way up her throat.

"Who's this?" someone inquired, and Merill looked up to see the Imperials watching her, standing alone beside the cart. "What's your name, girl?" one of them asked. Merill stared back, hard. She every gaze trained on her, and still she was silent. Someone stepped up behind her and struck her, hard, on the back of the head. She fell to her knees, coughing blood.

"Easy, Coltius," the Imperial Legate snapped sharply. "It doesn't matter, she dies with the others."

"She's just a girl, Legate. A child."

"I'm no child," Merill snarled at them, and one of the soldiers kicked her, hard, in the side.

"See? Not a child. She goes to the block," the Legate pronounced, turning to speak to a Thalmor that had approached. Merill craned her eyes up at them and her heart dropped at what she saw – the agent speaking to the Legate was a looming Altmer man, his fine-boned face cruel and pointed, his silky white hair braided out of the way of those dark gold eyes. She recognized him in an instant – the man who'd caught her in the woods, the man who'd cut out her eye and killed her family. Merill dropped her gaze, her heart pounding in her throat. _Does he know me?_

"At least you'll die at home, sister," the man beside the Legate murmured, putting away his list. The Thalmor with the Legate pushed another woman forward suddenly, a young Altmer that stumbled as she joined the executionees. The woman's gold hair hung in a tangled knot around her head and her bright eyes were cold with anger. Merill glanced around, wondering if anyone else was puzzled by the presence of an Altmer at a Thalmor execution, but the other prisoners all stared downward. She lowered her gaze as well as the priest spoke their last rites, shouting over the jeers of the watching villagers. Someone threw a stone, and it struck the man beside her in the arm. He bit his lip but made no sound as blood began to trickle down his elbow.

Merill forced herself to watch, struggling to keep her face blank, as the first Stormcloak was pushed forward and shoved to his knees upon the block, as the hooded executioner raised his blackened axe and removed the rebel's head with a single clean swipe. The man's head rolled neatly into the box, lifeless body slumping to the side as the onlookers screamed. She glanced to the side, at the other Stormcloaks that watched with grim stoicism.

"Now, the girl," the Legate called, and Merill moved forward, staring around for an exit, anything. But fear was screaming in her gut now. She felt that hot, primal feeling deep inside her, curdling and driving upward, clawing to escape, but it didn't know how.

Someone shoved her down, and her chin hit the stone, hard, splitting her lip. She tasted blood as she stared at the severed head of the man who had come before her, her breath sharp in her throat. She glanced upward, staring around for help, and her eyes met the Thalmor agent. His brow furrowed at the sight of her, but just as the recognition dawned on his face, the executioner kicked her and seized her tangled mat of red curls, tossing them over her face to show her neck. Merill could feel her heart pounding against the stone block.

A sudden sound echoed across the mountains around Helgen, causing all to raise their heads skyward. Merill chanced a glance up, but the executioner's boot forced her down again.

_So this is how it ends,_ she thought bitterly, licking the salty blood from her lip. _Didn't even make it past the border._

"What was that?" someone muttered. Then a woman screamed, and the executioner had raised his axe high, not looking as a great shadow darkened the sky and landed upon Helgen's tower, shaking the earth. The executioner stumbled, dropping his axe, and Merill scrambled to her knees as the colossal shadow stared down upon the screaming crowd, its flaming eyes meeting hers. The beast screamed a word, and thunder filled the sky as it swirled into an ashy red.

Merill slowly rose to her feet as rebels and Imperials alike streamed past her, some drawing weapons and others shrieking in fear. She stared into the eyes of the black, jagged monster, feeling hypnotized by the fire in its gaze.

"Quickly, girl!" someone shouted, and the grizzled man from her cart seized her arm and pulled her away from the block, toward the keep in the centre of the village. Merill regained her footing and followed him, ducking into the lower floor of the tower as the ground shook beneath her.

"What _was_ that thing?" the haggard man was asking to the other Imperials that lined the tower.

"A dragon. It had to be." Merill yanked the door open, staring outside, but one of the soldiers pulled her away, slamming it shut as the ground trembled.

"Let _go_ of me!" she snapped, trying to pull away, but the tower shook again, stones raining down from the ceiling, forcing her to duck.

"Get out of here!" she heard one of the soldiers shout, and someone flung her toward the stairs that spiraled up the wall of the tower and pushed her upward. As she staggered toward the first landing, the very wall collapsed and the beast's head plunged in, breathing searing flame into the tower. Merill stumbled backward and the great dragon's head vanished, the tower shaking again as it launched itself away. The grizzled Imperial pulled her up to the landing, pointing through the hole the beast had made at a ruined building below.

"This tower's about to come down," he breathed heavily. "Can you make the jump down?" Merill shoved his hands away from her and stepped back, readying herself for the leap. "I'll meet you on the ground!" she heard the man shout, but she had already jumped, sailing through the air and landing, hard, on the wood of the inn below. She struggled to her feet, blood welling on the scrapes across her hands and knees, as the boards splintered and dropped her on the lower floor amid a shower of dust and broken wood. Merill got to her feet, coughing and wiping blood across her face from a wound somewhere. She glanced around for something that would cut the ropes that bound her hands, but a roar overhead made her abandon her search and move on.

The ground was utter chaos, every building afire and every man loosing arrows at the great beast that circled the sky. Merill stumbled past them all, running blindly, not knowing where to go or what to do.

"This way!" someone called, and Merill sprinted blindly toward the voice, coming from the stone keep. She flew inside, stumbling on the rough stones as the soldier that had tried to show her mercy slammed and barred the door behind them.

"Here," the man said, offering her a potion. He was kind-faced, thick-muscled with dark hair that was matted with blood. She knocked it out of his hands and sat up, wiping the blood from her chin.

"I don't need it," she snarled, making to push away as he knelt before her. "At least let me get those binds off you," he muttered, snatching up a knife on the ground.

"I don't need your help," she hissed.

"You can try and kill me after we get out of here," he said, grabbing her wrists and beginning to saw at the bindings. "I'm not leaving a girl here on her own. There," he murmured as the ropes slid onto the floor. Merill met his gaze, rubbing the raw skin on her wrists.

"What was that thing?" she asked quietly.

"A dragon," the man said with a sort of terrible reverence, standing and offering her a hand. She took it, pulling herself to her feet and staring around. They were in a high-ceilinged tower room, the walls coated with moss and leaking dust as the stones shook with the dragon's muffled roars. "I believed them gone, but…that was all it could have been." He moved to the side of the room, where a dead rebel lay face down in a puddle of steaming blood. "You may as well take his equipment," the man said, leaning down and pulling off the man's armour.

"I'd sooner feed myself to that beast than wear Stormcloak colors," she muttered as another roar shook the tower room. "Or Imperial colors. I don't work for either of you."

"This is about surviving lass, not principle," he tried, but Merill crossed her arms stubbornly. "Then at least take his axe," the man sighed, holding it out to her. Merill took it uncertainly. The weapon felt heavy and gawky in her hand, wrong and loud. She felt a pang for her bow, undoubtedly on some dead Imperial's back now, and another for the old bow Brelin had helped her make, lost when she had fled the forest years ago.

Sudden voices from the hall beyond echoed into the tower room, and he pulled her down beside him, out of sight of the gated door.

"Can you fight with that, girl?" he whispered as the voices drew nearer.

"A bow would be surer in my hand, but this will do," she muttered, hefting the axe. The door swung open and two Stormcloaks came through, immediately set upon by the soldier's blade. Merill took the larger of the two, sending his helmet flying with a knock from the blunt end of the axe and burying the front of it in his exposed head. The man crumpled to the ground, spurting blood all down Merill's front, and she bent to search him as the Imperial bent to search the other soldier

"You're not bad with that, girl," he remarked as Merill drew forth with a few loose coins that she tucked into her tunic. She didn't respond. The man frowned. "We should get going. I'm Hadvar, by the way," he added, but Merill didn't respond.

The last thing she wanted to do was follow an armed Imperial that looked to be a good hands taller than her, but there seemed to be little other option. So she trailed Hadvar through the basement of the tower, then around and through into the caves far underground as they met with more Stormcloaks, searching for a passage out. It was not long before they met a Stormcloak with a longbow across his back, and Merill gratefully threw away the axe and buckled the dead man's quiver around her hips. She rose with the bow, testing the string and draw with her finger. It was a longbow, simple and not very powerful, made for the shooting flank of an Imperial infantry, but it would do.

Before long, they had found a passage leaking snow and light into the cavern, and the soldiers trooped out of it one by one, blinking in the sunlight.

"Get down," Hadvar hissed as a roar echoed above them, and the soldiers took cover in the brush along the path, Hadvar pulling Merill down beside him. The great black dragon soared overhead, his scream circling the mountains that edged the valley. It beat its wings twice and vanished into the clouds that coated the sky, leaving an eerie silence in his wake. The other soldiers rose slowly, sheathing their weapons and staring skyward with troubled faces.

"We should get to Riverwood," Hadvar murmured, "let them know what's going on." He turned to speak to Merill, but she was already gone, dashing down the hill and into the trees. Living in a Markarth gang had imbued a mistrust of soldiers in her, and she wanted nothing to do with their war. She ran more quickly than they could, smaller and unarmored, and darted through the rocks and bushes, wading through the first water she found. The river water was murky and freezing, but she had gone so long in a torn-up tunic and leggings that she barely noticed the cold as she emerged, sopping, from the water and scaled an enormous evergreen, pulling herself into the cover of its needles and peering out from between them to search for any sign of pursuers, but the Imperials seemed to not much care or have given up.

Merill leaned back against the evergreen's trunk, holding the longbow in her lap and letter her breath slow. _I need a plan, _she told herself firmly. Kiseen was dead and a dragon just destroyed Helgen. She was utterly alone in the world, for the first time since the Thalmor burned their cabin. She knew the river she'd just crossed was the White River, in Falkreath Hold, but she couldn't bear to go back to Falkreath. New people rarely came to that village, and they would surely remember her and cast her out again. There was nothing left for her in the rainy southern lands.

Merill shifted on the branch, staring north. She had forgotten most of the geography Brelin had taught her, but she knew the White River fed into a city not far from Falkreath. Whiterun, maybe? _I can go there,_ she thought, sliding off the branch and onto the mossy, snow-dusted ground. _And…figure something out from there._ She didn't like being in the forests, not anymore. She needed a city, a place where she could tuck herself into a dark corner and watch the world trickle by. Merill decided began to follow the river north, her boots crunching in the fresh snow that whispered along its banks, wishing for gloves to warm her callused hands and letting her mind wander.

A dragon.

Merill waited for the realization to hit her, for the shock and fear and awe to come, but she still felt as numb as her white left eye. She faintly remembered the bed-tales and stories Brelin had told them when she was a girl, of the days when dragons blotted the sun from the sky and ruled over man from the mountaintops, and how men had learned the tongue of dragons and shouted them out of Mundus forever, banishing their tyranny. Brelin didn't know many Nord stories, but he had always believed it was important for Merill to know her own people's stories and had offered them to her when he could. She had vague memories of a travelling wizard in Falkreath teaching them words out of the dragon tongue in exchange for a few coins, but they had long since faded from her mind. Nalimir had always sworn that this had never happened, and she often wondered if it was only a dream concocted by her adventurous mind. The dragons had always seemed like some sort of storybook beings that would always watch from the mountains in children's heads, but were nothing more.

And yet she had seen one, stared into its eyes for what felt like hours.

It was impossible to tell the time of day through the thick clouds that darkened the sky as she rounded the final corner of the path and was met with the sprawling orange plains of Whiterun. Farms and holdfasts dotted the fields around the great walled city that rose up to a peak at a tall-tiered palace carved with dragon heads. Merill paused on the ridge, staring out at the plains. In comparison to the gritty chaos of Markarth, Whiterun, with its low timber-and-stone walls and its scattered farms, seemed almost quaint.

Farmers and guards cast her curious looks as she strode by, a short one-eyed Nord girl caked in dirt and blood, but she paid them little mind, crossing over a drawbridge and up a small slope to the wooden gates. The two guards there stopped her with wary eyes.

"City's closed with the dragons about," one said while the other scanned her ragged appearance suspiciously.

"But I need to go in," she told them, puzzled. _City's closed? Who ever closed a city?_

"Don't make no difference to me," he growled. "Go on, get out of here, forest rat."

"I'm not forest rat," Merill snarled, and the guards tensed, their hands straying to their weapons. Merill forced herself to calm. She was about to turn away when an idea struck her.

"I need to speak to Jarl Balgruuf," Merill told them firmly, and the guards exchanged a glance.

"About what?" the second guard asked.

"The dragons." Bewilderment blossomed on their faces.

"Were you…?"

"I just came from Helgen," she said, gesturing to her haggard appearance. "The thing was flying this way, I thought I should warn him. Dunno if anybody else made it out alive," she lied.

"I'll take her up," one guard muttered to the other, who nodded, and the first guard gestured for her to follow him through the gate.

Whiterun was a rambling city, a cobbled street winding up the hill and little timber houses with stained-glass windows perched crookedly along the path. Merill cast a sidelong glance at her guide. It would be easy to shove him and dash away, but there were too few people around, barely any places to hide.

"I can find the Jarl on my own," she remarked, and the guard ignored her, leading her up through a plaza with a dead tree and starting up the broad stone stairs there.

"Go on," he told her as they reached the palace's bridge, leading straight to two tall wooden doors carved with dragons, their tails curling together and their eyes cruel. "Jarl Balgruuf's just inside."

Resigned, Merill pushed her way through the door, stepping quietly into Whiterun's palace.


	4. Chapter 4

The cavernous stone hall was dark and quiet save for a maid sweeping near the door. Merill ascended to the main hall, lit by a low-burning fire pit in its centre, and moved around it, making for the Jarl's throne, her footsteps echoing on the high, shadowed walls. Nerves twisted in her gut despite herself – she had seen Markarth's jarl on occasion, and had once passed Falkreath's in the street, but never any more than that. She was more accustomed to stealing and running from fur-swathed nobles than speaking to them at their thrones.

"What is the meaning for this interruption?" The Jarl's great seat was empty, but the irritated inquiry came from a Dunmer woman who had met Merill with her knife drawn, eyes dark with suspicion. "The city is supposed to be closed."

"I have news from Helgen," Merill told her, crossing her arms. The Dunmer scanned Merill's haggard appearance, her eyes flicking from Merill's scratched and bloodied face with a single eye to the torn and blackened rags she wore. The woman reluctantly sheathed her blade, her eyes still narrowed in mistrust.

"That explains why the guards let you in," she muttered. "Come, then, the Jarl will want to speak to you personally." Merill followed the woman across the hall to a side-room, where a blue-robed man leaned over a table laden with books and scrolls and gems, speaking animatedly to a man Merill could only assume was the Jarl of Whiterun. He was a short man, though built heavily, his sleeveless fur ruff revealing muscled arms and his stern face set with and a thick, square jaw. He looked up as they entered, his pale eyes half-hidden under bushy, stern brows.

"My Jarl, this girl claims to have come from Helgen," the Dunmer was saying. Balgruuf straightened, ignoring the glances thrown to him by the court wizard and the steward near the map at the back of the room.

"Are we so wrapped up in this war that we've forgotten Nordic hospitality?" Balgruuf snapped, turning to his steward. "Someone get this girl a healer, then we will talk of dragons."

"Come this way, then, miss," the steward said, quickly coming over and laying a hand on her back.

"I don't need a healer," Merill shot back at one, stepping away from the steward. "I'm fine."

"Can you see out of that eye, then?" he asked her scathingly, and Merill instinctively touched the scar over her cloudy eye.

"That didn't happen at Helgen," she told him darkly, and the Jarl stared at her a moment before he shook his head to the steward, who stepped away. Balgruuf stepped closer to her, and Merill stood her ground, staring up at him with her arms crossed.

"How old are you, girl?"

"I'm nineteen." She felt a small bit of pride at the barely-concealed surprise on the Jarl's face. Merill wasn't tall, but she was stocky with muscle, her freckled skin lined with scars.

"And what's your name?" he asked.

"Merill."

"So, Merill, you saw this dragon with your own eyes, did you?"

"It flew off toward Whiterun. That's why I came here."

"But you saw the beast? You knew it was a dragon?"

"There was nothing else it could have been," she responded, crossing her arms again.

"By Ysmir, Irileth was right," he murmured, scratching his beard concernedly. "What do you say to this, Proventus?" Jarl Balgruuf said to his steward, who had retaken his position on the Jarl's right side. "Shall we continue trusting in the strength of our walls? Against a dragon?"

"My lord, we should send troops to Riverwood at once," the Dunmer, called Irileth interjected, crossing the hall from the wizard's lab. "It's in the most immediate danger, and if that dragon's lurking in the mountains –"

"The Jarl of Falkreath will see that as a provocation!" the steward interrupted, and they locked eyes, angrily. "He'll assume we're preparing to join Ulfric's side and –"

"Enough!" Balgruuf snarled, rising from his chair. All sound in the grand hall deadened save for the crackling of the great fire. "I'll not stand idly by while a dragon destroys my hold and slaughters my people!" He rubbed his eyes tiredly. "Irileth, send a detachment to Riverwood at once."

"Yes, my Jarl," Irileth muttered, casting the steward a dark look and turning to leave. The steward returned the sour gaze and crossed to the other side of the room, muttering about returning to his duties. The Jarl turned his searching eyes back to Merill.

"Now, girl, I'd thank you. You've done my hold a great service." He nodded to a nearby steward, who counted out a few coins and passed them to Merill. "Did your family die in Helgen, girl?"

"They died a long time ago." He gazed at her a moment, his eyes searching.

"I am sorry then. I hope you get where you need to go."

He waved in dismissal, and Merill turned away, letting out a relieved sigh. She slid the coins into the pocket of her leggings and moved around the fireplace, taking the side route out of the hall. As she neared a smaller side room, voices drifted out into the main hall, a man with a heavy western accent and another woman.

"…finally taken an interest, so now I'm able to devote most of my time to this research," the wizard was saying.

"Time is running, Farengar, don't forget." Merill neared the doorway into the lab and paused just outside it, glancing back to be sure no one was watching. "This isn't some theoretical question. Dragons have come back."

"Yes, yes, don't worry," the wizard muttered, and the sound of a book closing reached Merill's ears. "Although the chance to see a living dragon up close would be tremendously valuable…Now, let me show you something else I found. Very intriguing. I think your employers may be interested as well –"

"You have a visitor," the woman said, and Merill's face grew hot. She quickly made to move past the doorway, but a word from Farengar stopped her, holding what appeared to be a heavy stone tablet.

"Very brave, what you did for Whiterun," he said with a smile, and Merill saw the woman with him standing behind a table, a leather hood covering her face. "I'm sorry to hear that your home was destroyed. If there's anything I can do to help, just say the word."

"You're studying dragons?" Merill asked as the hooded woman turned to study an open book on the table.

"Ah, I've been studying them for years," he told her. "Fascinating creatures, although I had long believed them to be a sort of metaphor for some other kind of evil the ancient Nords faced. I would die for the chance to meet a living one, though." He raised the tablet, showing her the dark, age-stained stone scratched with incomprehensible markings. "I've only just come across this," he said excitedly. "It seems to be some kind of artifact from the dragon age. These markings here…" he continued on, but Merill's attention had been caught by one of the scratches on the tablet that seemed to almost…glow.

"Farengar," the hooded woman snapped, and he quickly jerked out of his reverie and lowered the tablet, turning away and joining the woman at the table. Merill watched them poring over the book for another moment before she turned and made her way down and out into the dim light that had begun to leak through the thick blanket of cloud. A faint wind stirred her hair around her face, and she stared around at the small city spread out before her.

A bow. She had to get herself a better bow. She could make one, but something from a shop would be quicker to get. She reached into the pocket of the frock and counted the coins they'd given her. _Five hundred drakes. _Merill gave a sharp intake of breath. This was more than she'd ever owned in her life. On Markarth's bridges, this was a fortune. _That should be plenty._

She descended back into the city, glancing up at the wooden signs that swung from shop awnings. The market square was busy, vendors hawking their wares at passerby and beggars watching from the alleys as people hurried by. Everywhere she turned, Merill heard whispers.

"…utterly destroyed, just a smoking ruin now…"

"…something else, surely. Dragons, how ridiculous…"

"…heard no-one got out alive…"

"…cousin told me that they had Ulfric Stormcloak there and no-one's seen him since the attack…"

"…there are loggers from Riverwood coming in, too scared to stay that close to Helgen. But can you blame them?"

Merill passed them by, glad that no-one seemed to notice her as the bloody girl that had come into the city an hour before. When her walk brought her to the front of town again, a guard directed her to a shop just inside the gate, a faded wooden sign brandishing the name _The Drunken Huntsman_ just outside. It would have been easy to rob, but Merill felt the coins burning a hole in her pocket, and a sudden desire to spend money freely, for once in her life, overtook her.

The tavern was quiet and nearly empty, the Bosmer proprietor dozing at the counter. He started awake when the door opened and smiled as Merill approached. She felt a twinge of regret at the sight of him – he wore a long ponytail down his back and his face was creased with laugh lines. He looked like Brelin.

"Ah, good to see you, friend. What can I help you with today?" Merill pulled the bow from Helgen off her back and laid it on the counter.

"I need a better bow. And more arrows, if you've got them." The man lifted the longbow carefully, testing the bowstring with a practiced hand.

"Cheap and weak, but I suppose it would do the job," he muttered. "I can give you thirty Septims for it. Are you a hunter?"

"Something like that," Merill murmured.

"You'll want one of these, then," the shopkeep said excitedly, turning to take a bow off the rack on the wall. "Our finest hunting bow. Black walnut, with a silk and linen bowstring. Has a good balance to it, makes for a quick, light shot." He passed the bow over the counter to her and Merill shifted it in her left hand, twinging the bowstring. She drew it back, angling it toward the wall.

"Good weight," she agreed, loosening the string. The shopkeep handed her an arrow and she nocked it, drawing back the bow and aiming for a straw target on the other end of the room and automatically correcting her aim to account for her one blind eye. Merill loosed the arrow and it struck just below the center, annoying her. Her shooting still wasn't as sharp as it had been before the fire. Perhaps it never would be.

"You've got a good eye, though," the Bosmer told her enthusiastically. "Better than most of the hopefuls that come trekking in here thinking they can buy a fancy bow and down an elk with one shot. How long have you been shooting?"

"A while," Merill told him, lowering the bow onto the counter. "How much?"

The shopkeep had recommended she stay at the Bannered Mare, an inn at the end of the market district that frequently hosted travelers. She paid for a modest room through the end of the week and bought a chunk of bread and a flagon of ale, sitting in the corner to eat it and avoiding the conversation around the fire, though she listened intently as the dinner crowd came trickling in.

"These beasts sound to me like trolls with wings," one particularly brutish man was shouting. "Give me a good thick hammer and I'll crush in its skull, good as any."

"I think dragons are a touch different from trolls, Sinmir," the Redguard barmaid chuckled, passing him another flagon.

"Ah, what do you know of dragons, woman?" the Nord called, taking a hearty swig of mead.

"How do we know the thing's even real?" someone else said, and those around the fire twittered uncertainly. "The Imperials could have made the whole thing up to cover up Stormcloak's escape."

"I saw Helgen myself just an hour past, it's a great smoking ruin," a shabbily dressed man called out, and someone clapped him on the head.

"An hour past you were passed out on my stoop, Brenuin," the barkeep called, and Merill shoved in the last bit of bread and started up the stairs, unable to take the conversation any longer.

It felt like years since she had slept. Even in The Bannered Mare's dark upper room with the noise from the bar below shut firmly out, she could feel her anger roiling in her gut, rimmed with something like…loneliness? No. She'd been on her own long enough.

Merill turned onto her side, staring at the pool of wax that had formed below the dark candle. _Brelin and Nalimir, now Kiseen,_ she thought bitterly. _My fault. My own fucking fault. _The comforts of a real bed were lost on her she rolled onto her back, glaring at the ceiling as if it had done her a personal offense. _I'll start over here,_ she told herself. _Start over, with no thoughts of fire or dragons. _She ran a finger along the thick ridge that passed through her eye and closed it, trying to will herself to sleep.

Merill rose before the sun, donning a dark cloak and a simple cloth chestplate that she had bought alongside her new bow, which she strung across her shoulders as she quietly left the still-sleeping inn. Brelin had taught her that the early morning was the best time to hunt, when the sun had not yet peered over the horizon and the game was just waking and venturing forth to find food for the day. It had been years since she had hunted game, but the plains were cold and open, and she needed something else to focus on.

The streets were empty save for sleepy-eyed guards, and Merill proceeded out into the plains without hindrance. She had never hunted in the plains before, but here it was easier to see the game and simple to hide in the thick orange bushes that coated the ground.

She got far enough away from the city so that the lights were shrouded in darkness and scanned the horizon for movement. When her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, they caught sight of a solitary elk grazing near the road – a female, small, but good practice. Merill crept closer, staying low to the ground and stepping softly, barely making a sound as she slowly drew an arrow from her quiver and nocked it. She pinched the arrow's nock between her first two fingers, slowly drawing the bowstring back to the corner of her mouth. She drew in a breath, squinting to focus, and felt time slow and the air quiet as she angled the arrow just below the elk's head. Then, quick as light, her fingers opened and the arrow sprung free, barely making a sound as the fletching brushed her skin, spiraling through the weeds until it struck the elk squarely between the eyes.

Merill let out her breath and lowered her bow, smiling. It had been too long since she had hunted purely for the sake of shooting. She crossed the plains and knelt beside her kill, brushing her hair out of her face as she pulled the arrow from the beast's head and cleaned it on her cloak before tucking it back into the quiver. She had learned how to strip an elk when she was eight, and the steps came back to her easily. Even so, the sun had already begun to rise as Merill took down three more elk and a solitary wolf. It had to be nearly noon by the time she returned to town and started circling around all the stalls, selling off pelts and antlers. The day was brighter than it had been yesterday, and Merill spent the afternoon beneath the dead tree, flipping through a torn and dog-eared book she had found at one of the stalls. _I can do this,_ she thought to herself, laying the book down and staring out at the city that moved leisurely around her. _I can live like this, however long I have to._ Hunting in the mornings and selling the game, just like they used to do in Falkreath. It would last her a while, at least, help her save some money. Then onto another city. South, maybe.

One cloudy morning nearly a fortnight since found Merill on the plains once more. She was hunched over a wolf carcass, skinning the beast for its pelt and imagining that this would be her last kill of the day. She was nearly done when a hauntingly familiar sound forced her to break from her work.

A bone-shattering roar, echoing off the walls of the mountains that guarded Whiterun's plains.

Merill slowly raised her eye to the sky, hardly daring to believe it. Since the dragon's flight from Helgen, there hadn't been a single whisper of the beast's whereabouts. She had begun to wonder if the whole thing had even been real.

But no, it was there, a great black shadow high above, half-shrouded by clouds, its roars matching the thunder that reverberated through the valley. Merill rose slowly, tucking away her skinning knife and wheeling around. The plains were silent and empty, as if every living being had fled when the dragon's scent hit the wind. She shouldered her kills, shoving her bow back into its place across her chest, and began to run, sprinting back toward the city fast and light as a hare.

The city was eerily quiet and calm, as if no one could feel the sheer panic that seemed to have permeated the air. She could hear the dragons screams renting the sky, but the people of Whiterun paid it no mind, passing it off as the thunder that beckoned. Merill shoved through the midday market crowds and pushed past guards that tried to stop her as she flung open the great doors of Dragonsreach and skirted the fire, coming to a sliding halt before the Jarl's throne.

"It's here," she breathed, and Jarl Balgruuf rose up at once, calling his guard captain to his side. "It was flying in from the south. Fast. Toward the watchtower on the plains."

"Irileth, take your best swords down to the watchtower. Now," the Jarl told her, turning the Merill. "There's no time to stand on ceremony, girl. I need your help again." There was a beat in which they all stared at her, waiting for her answer.

She gave a curt nod.

"Go with Irileth. Put an end to this beast and the havoc it means to unleash upon my city. You have more experience with dragons than anyone else here. We need you." Irileth touched Merill's shoulder, and they started toward the entrance. "One more thing, Irileth," Balgruuf called, and the Dunmer turned. "This isn't a death or a glory mission. I need to know what we're dealing with."

"Of course, my lord," Irileth said, nodding to him, and she led Merill from the hall. "You said this beast was moving toward the watchtower?"

"It looked like it," Merill said as they jogged down the stairs of Dragonsreach. The roars were gone now, but people were staring skyward, worry on their faces as guards hurried through the streets. "It was circling when I first saw it, but then it started moving west."

"Well, I hope you know what you're doing, girl," Irileth said sharply, pushing civilians that blocked the way aside. _I don't,_ Merill thought, but she stayed silent. _What the hell am I getting myself into?_

They were met with a small troop of twelve city guards at the gates. The rain continued to threaten as Irileth led the way down into the plains and west, toward the watchtower. The dragon was nowhere to be seen, but a column of smoke was rising slowly into the air from the tower's stones. Merill glanced at the guards alongside them, their eyes flicking uncertainly up to the thundering sky.

"The brute's been here," Irileth said as they drew nearer. She pulled her blade from its sheath, staring around. "Spread out. Search for survivors." Merill drew her bow and nocked an arrow, keeping her fingers ready on the bowstring as she moved closer to the smoking ruin, the crackle of flame filling her ears. The watchtower looked as if it had been two towers connected by a stone bridge, but fresh rubble and broken stone and ash coated the tall grasses, leaving one tower intact with a shattered bridge. Merill carefully navigated the fallen rubble and moved up the bridge to search inside the tower. Sudden movement made her start, but it was only a Whiterun guard, holding his bow aloft and looking terrified.

"No," he whispered hastily as she drew near. "Get back! Hroki just got grabbed when he tried to make a run for it! It's still here!" As he spoke, another earth-shattering roar split the sky, and Merill sharply drew the arrow back, aiming it skyward. It was there, a black bit of shadow soaring in from the mountains.

"Kynareth preserve us!" someone shouted, and Merill slid off the bridge, angling her arrow toward the great beast's head. She was about to loose it when it stretched open its great jaw and screamed out fire, blistering, searing fire that melted the very stone of the watchtower. It wheeled its head around, sending the blinding pillar of heat burning through the grass toward them. Merill let the arrow go and dove to the side, taking cover under a broken chunk of stone. _Hunting was never like this,_ she thought, wiping sweat from her brow. The dragon screamed again and the air cooled, and Merill somersaulted out from under the cracking stone to avoid being crushed.

The other guards also had their bows, but they were shooting blindly, not taking travel distance into account and subsequently missing the beast by great lengths. Merill nocked another arrow and closed one eye, breathing in as she readied the bolt. At the last minute, she switched her shot, aiming for the dragon's wing rather than its scaly head, and the arrow shot upward, piercing the leathery skin. The dragon screamed in frustration, losing its balance and crashing into the watchtower, sending stone and flame flying.

"Aim for its wings!" Irileth called out. "Try to ground the beast!" The dragon regained its balance, pumping back into the sky and letting out another deafening roar. Irileth had taken up position on the east flank, shooting streams of lighting at the dragon while the rest of the men tried unsuccessfully to down it.

Merill climbed one side of the ruined bridge and took careful aim, loosing nearly six more arrows in the dragon's wings before it careened past them and slammed into the grass, sliding nearly the length of the city and sending up a spray of dust and rock.

Irileth had beaten them to the front and had her blade out, hacking at the beast's head while it tried to bypass her shield and snap her spine in half. The other guards followed suit, drawing blades and trying to surround the creature. It turned once, sweeping its lethal spiked tail around and sending the guards stumbling back in a spray of blood. Merill shot an arrow at the creature's underbelly, and suddenly, it turned its sharp gaze straight at her.

The dragon screamed again, but this time it sounded like a word echoing through the hills. It swung its great head around and moved toward her, frighteningly fast for a creature of such size, and Merill moved backward, firing as many arrows as she could seize as the creature sped toward her. It screamed another word, a different one, and she stumbled backward, overtaken by the sheer force of the roar. The dragon breathed in a great breath and Merill dove behind a stone as flame shot out, turning everything it struck to ash. The dragon was still moving, wailing fire as it trundled toward her, so Merill darted around the stone behind it readying an arrow as she did so. When she was behind the beast, she shouted once, and it turned its great, terrifying eyes on her. Merill loosed the arrow, and in a split second it had buried itself in the beasts left eye.

The dragon screamed in frustration, leaving Irileth free to rush forward and put a sword through its head. It jerked upward suddenly, sending Irileth's blade flying, and its wings and tail seemed to droop as it crumpled back down to lie motionless upon the torn and scorched earth. As the dragon died, Merill thought she heard a voice carrying on the wind.

"_Dovahkiin! No!_"

Merill lowered her bow, breathing hard, and realized the rain had started. Her hair was plastered to her face and the fires hissed as water struck them. She could hear Irileth speaking, but her eyes stayed trained on the dragon's, a strange feeling overcoming her. _Dovahkiin. No._

Merill moved forward slowly, reaching for the shaft of her arrow that had buried itself in the creature's eye. _Dovahkiin. No._ As she touched it, a great hissing seemed to emanate from the beast, and Merill stepped back, alarmed. _Dovahkiin. _The dragon's scales turned brighter and brighter until Merill could feel the heat searing off them, the flames that burned and melted off the creature's very bones. _Dovahkiin. _A loud wind seemed to fill the air, deafening all other sound. Light emanated from the creature's burning flesh, so bright it drowned all else from sight. _Dovahkiin._ Then, all at once, Merill's knees felt weak and her head swam. She felt herself collapsing, but the light was too strong to understand what was happening. _Dovahkiin._ She wanted to close her eyes, but couldn't. It was as if she were floating, with no control over anything, just floating in the light and the wind that blinded and deafened her…

_Dovahkiin._

At first, she could only hear the rain, pouring down around her, soaking into her hair, her clothes, her very skin. Then the voices came, the guards shouting in disbelief, the echo of _Dovahkiin _fading in her mind. Merill realized she was on the ground, soaking wet and covered in mud, and she slowly rolled into a sitting position, yanking her bow out of the slop.

"I don't believe it," one of the guards was saying as Merill got shakily to her feet. She stared at where the dragon had been moments ago, now merely a colossal skeleton, meat and scale and muscle clean from its bones. She turned back to the guards, who were all staring at her with a sort of reverence.

"What?" she murmured, trying to mop the mud off her cloak. None of them spoke. Even Irileth stood silent, watching her with a sort of resigned wonder. Merill turned to look at the dragon skeleton again, lying with its wings spread out, as if it had been shot down in flight. She started back toward the guards, and several of them took sudden steps back. "_What_?" Merill snapped again, shouldering her bow. One of the guards took a half step forward.

"You're…you're Dragonborn."

Silence permeated the air, broken only by the patter of rain on mud and the occasional boom of thunder overhead.

"I'm…what?" Merill asked, the strange feeling blooming in her chest again. She had never heard the word, but it made something stir deep inside her, that hot, primal feeling that rolled in her gut, no way out.

"You had better get back to the Jarl," Irileth said suddenly, as if coming out of a reverie. "We'll stay here. Got to write a report for this mess." She turned to the rest of the guards, who were still staring at Merill. "Enough gawking. Start the body count." When they didn't move, she slapped the nearest one over the head. "Now!" she snapped, and the guards scattered. Irileth turned to Merill, an unreadable expression on her face. "You. Get back to the Jarl. Now."

The rain began to lighten as Merill followed the road toward the lights of Dragonsreach in the distance, the sun peering halfheartedly through the clouds and the thunder's boom growing less and less. She was soaked through and shivering, but she didn't care. Her mind could only echo what had just happened. _You're Dragonborn. Dovahkiin. No._

The plains felt oddly still and quiet as she neared the city. It felt as if the whole world had quieted for a bit to take a rest, to pause and breathe. Merill slowed before she passed through the city gates, and something drew her eyes up to the Throat of the World, the mountain that dominated all the world with its sheer height. As she watched, the sky seemed to light up, and a great crashing shout echoed throughout the world.

"_DOVAHKIIN!"_

The noise faded, and the sound of the weakly falling rain gradually returned. Merill stared up at the peak of the Throat of the World, rubbing rain from her eyes. It was too much. This scream from the mountaintops, the fallen dragon, the light and the wind, the words that echoed so strongly in her ears…

It was similar to her first day in the city, when every eye had watched her push through the crowds to get to Dragonsreach. They had seen her with Irileth on the way to the watchtower, and they saw her now, coated in mud and soaked to the bone, with cuts on her face and hands. Merill ignored them, climbing the stairs of the Jarl's palace with the whisper of _Dovahkiin _in her ear.

Everyone seemed to already know what had happened. The guards watched her from their posts as she climbed into the hall and around the fireplace to where Jarl Balgruuf sat, his searching eyes keeping a steady gaze as she came to a halt before him, breaking the eerie silence in Dragonsreach's hall.

"The skies are quiet," he said finally, and Merill nodded.

"We took it down. A few guards were lost, I couldn't say how many. You'll have to wait for Irileth's report, I guess." The Jarl's studied her, his eyes searching.

"There's something else. _About your business!_" he roared suddenly, and Merill turned to see nearly everyone in the hall watching her. There was a great scuffle as the servants and guards went back about their duties. Merill looked back to the Jarl.

"We defeated the dragon. That's all."

"Don't lie to me, girl," the Jarl said firmly. "We heard the call from High Hrothgar. All of Skyrim did." She felt her face grow hot as the Jarl leaned on one hand, waiting for her answer.

"After…After it died, something…happened." The Jarl nodded, inviting her to speak further. "I think I…absorbed some kind of power from it. Its flesh went up in flames and I lost my sight for a minute and fell." Balgruuf sat back in his throne, rubbing his beard and shaking his head in slight disbelief.

"So it's true. The Greybeards really were summoning you."

"The Greybeards," Merill repeated to herself in a murmur. She had heard of the reclusive monks that lived atop the Throat of the World, even heard rumours that Ulfric Stormcloak had learned his infernal shouts from them. "What do the Greybeards want with me?"

"The Dragonborn is supposed to be uniquely gifted in the Voice – the ability to focus your vital essence into a Thu'um. A shout. The Greybeards are masters of the Way of the Voice. If you really are Dragonborn, they can teach you how to use your gift." Merill crossed her arms, her head pounding.

"I don't even know what that is."

"Dragonborn? What, your father didn't tell you of your own ancestors?" Merill didn't answer. "It's the name for a mortal born with the blood-and-soul of a dragon," the Jarl went on. "They're said to be extraordinarily strong-willed, able to master the dragon language and use it to unleash Thu'um – Shouts – same as dragons. Men can learn the Thu'um as well, but it takes years of focus and meditation. Legends say a Dragonborn can use it at once, as if he were a dragon himself."

"Sounds like a story," Merill replied defensively. "There's no truth to it. Mortals have never been born with dragon's blood. It's a bed-tale for boys that dream of glory."

"Tiber Septim was Dragonborn, and others too," Jarl Balgruuf told her firmly. "They may not have been seen for years, but they have existed. And the Greybeards are calling for one now. You had best get yourself to High Hrothgar, lass. It seems you may be able to play a role in the return of the dragons, whatever it means." Merill made to retort, but he waved her away, and she strode from the grand hall of Dragonsreach, the Jarl's words echoing in her head.


End file.
